New to FreeNAS. Some guidance requested.

[JeffSelf13]

Hey everyone! I just built my first FreeNAS system. Well, actually, just most of the hardware so far. I still haven't installed FreeNAS yet. Here's what I've put together so far:

ASRock Intel Avaton 2.4ghz octacore CPU and motherboard (C2750)
Silverstone Technology 450W Power Supply (ST45SF-G)
Silverstone Technology Mini-ITX NAS case (DS380B)
2 x Crucial 16GB Kit DDR3 ECC memory
SanDisk UltraFit 16GB Flash Drive (SDCZ43-016G-G46)

I plan to install FreeNAS to the SanDisk flash drive. I plan to install 8 x 4TB Western Digital Red 3.5" drives. I also may install an SSD drive for caching. Feedback?

As far as the drives go, I would love suggestions on how to setup ZFS on these drives. I plan to use the server to store my ripped movies, home movies that I've shot, my music collection and lots of photos from myself and my wife. I would also like to provide storage to myself, my wife and each of my kids. I also plan to install Plex Media Server to the FreeNAS.

I am a photographer and in my current setup, my images are stored on my iMac's hard drive and catalogued through Lightroom. My plan is to move the images to the FreeNAS. I also edit video with Final Cut Pro X. I currently store video on external hard drives and do my editing on these drives. I would love to move these files over to the FreeNAS as well. Anyone have experience with video editing and FreeNAS?

So I'm looking for suggestions on how to partition the 8 drives. Separate zPools for photographs, movies, music, etc? Thanks!

 

[Mirfster]

Welcome, yet another Virginian. :)

If this is your first FreeNas system, please take some time to get yourself familiarized (I have some "Recommended Reading" links in my sig).

I also may install an SSD drive for caching

Not sure if that is really going to help much (but others may chime in). I would recommend first going with more RAM. FreeNas loves RAM.

I tend to prefer RaidZ2;if you are video editing then that may be a good balance with speed, redundancy and space. Perhaps, a single RaidZ3 (8 x 4TB)?

 

[anodos]

Hey everyone! I just built my first FreeNAS system. Well, actually, just most of the hardware so far. I still haven't installed FreeNAS yet. Here's what I've put together so far:

ASRock Intel Avaton 2.4ghz octacore CPU and motherboard (C2750)
Silverstone Technology 450W Power Supply (ST45SF-G)
Silverstone Technology Mini-ITX NAS case (DS380B)
2 x Crucial 16GB Kit DDR3 ECC memory
SanDisk UltraFit 16GB Flash Drive (SDCZ43-016G-G46)

I plan to install FreeNAS to the SanDisk flash drive. I plan to install 8 x 4TB Western Digital Red 3.5" drives. I also may install an SSD drive for caching. Feedback?

As far as the drives go, I would love suggestions on how to setup ZFS on these drives. I plan to use the server to store my ripped movies, home movies that I've shot, my music collection and lots of photos from myself and my wife. I would also like to provide storage to myself, my wife and each of my kids. I also plan to install Plex Media Server to the FreeNAS.

I am a photographer and in my current setup, my images are stored on my iMac's hard drive and catalogued through Lightroom. My plan is to move the images to the FreeNAS. I also edit video with Final Cut Pro X. I currently store video on external hard drives and do my editing on these drives. I would love to move these files over to the FreeNAS as well. Anyone have experience with video editing and FreeNAS?

So I'm looking for suggestions on how to partition the 8 drives. Separate zPools for photographs, movies, music, etc? Thanks!

I'd probably make a single 8-disk RAIDZ2 zpool. ZFS likes having lots of free storage space. You'll want to plan your storage accordingly. A "cache" ssd probably doesn't make much sense in your use case. On the other hand, using an SSD to hold your jails (plex, etc.) can be a fairly big performance win. You'll want to put some testing and thought into how you're going to share data (NFS vs CIFS vs AFP).

I don't use apple products, but from what I understand adobe on Mac likes to store lots of metadata as resource forks / NTFS alternate datastreams (ADS). Currently CIFS can only store about 64KB of metadata as an ADS and this can cause problems for Mac clients. The situation will be much better in FreeNAS 10 (with a later version of Samba). On the other hand, NFS is pretty rock-solid but requires that you have a proper SLOG device. From what I understand AFP can be glitchy and is currently treated by apple like a red-headed stepchild.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Might be worth considering a mirrored pair of SSDs for video editing, with a main storage pool for everything else, and that you move completed video projects to. Otherwise you will have to build your whole pool with video editing in mind, which will force you to compromise more between performance and capacity.

Probably not worth adding L2ARC unless you up your RAM to at least 64GB.